Originally from the Bronx, I spent most of my formative years on Long Island, dreaming of the city through the works of Selby, Warhol, Reed, Wolfe, and, of course, Joey Ramone. After college I dove in. The mid 80s. Bright lights, big city, all of that. And while I loved the streets, the offerings, the smell of it all, truth be told I never really fit, but not for lack of trying. As downtown as I wanted to be, my heart was really Central Park West. On the park. Near the Dinosaurs. And the best hot and salty pretzel carts on earth. Or so I wanted to believe. And so I worked for that Central Park dream.

Through my 20s and 30s, striving and living in shoe boxes and holding court at French Roast or McSorley's once a month (Ok, McSorley's was way more than once a month) while figuring out how to get up the $2000 plus rent for 700 square feet was all fine and good. One day, and soon, I was going to make it, and Central Park West would swoop down and gather me. Into my 40s, striving and scraping and squeezing through 700 square feet of living space, snockered by the noise, bedraggled by the crowds, filthy with the grime of bus exhaust, well... at the age of 46 I finally realized that New York was a woman I was in love with, but whom wasn't loving me back the way I needed to be loved (I'm sure that isn't original, in fact I know it isn't, some other transplant laid it on me when I asked her why she left, but I'll use it anyway. It's perfect).

I had hit the ceiling. And my head hurt. Chances were looking quite good that I was never going to live the New York life I had imagined for myself.

What to do?

Well, I did nothing.

Fate did all the work in the form of a lay off and a job offer in Chicago. I went with boxes and a bag and I went through withdrawals, depression, anger, fear, spite, and psychosomatic bouts of various sickness. But what I did, right off the bat, was find the closest thing, in my mind, to my Central Park dream. A grand old apartment building with good size space, right on a park -- with stunning views of the lake to max it all out -- smack dab in front of the zoo. Howling monkey's woke me.

Howling wolves put me to sleep.

Heaven -- for a hell of a lot less than I was spending on a much smaller apartment with no light on a street I had no interest in hanging out on. Slowly, I have come to embrace Chicago. It is NOT New York. To compare it would be unfair to either city. Chicago is its own beast, a city with a bit of a chip on its shoulder in truth, that second city moniker really having set into the psyche of many of its residents, if not its very soil and mortar. But it shouldn't ever feel inferior. It's so rich.

And so livable (despite the tragic violence of the south and west side). I can breathe in Chicago. I can partake in all of the things I was doing in New York -- art and foodie stuff and music and sports and literature and film and the ZOO. Right across the street. Nothing like sipping a latte, reading the Trib and the NY Times (old habits die hard) while watching the seals take their morning constitutional. New York is sometimes a fantasy, and to live that fantasy some of us tend to become a little delusional to rationalize our often lacking situations. That's from me. I know people my age, still struggling, who would never leave NYC. For any reason.

Being true to myself, I know I am not one of them. I am also not the artistic elite, master of Wall Street, anyone near the upper echelons of any professional endeavor (am I now sounding pathetic, I wonder?) who can simply live exactly how they want anywhere where they want for as long as they want. I'm just a working guy who likes city life.

Emphasis on LIFE. I can LIVE in Chicago. New York is the world.

Chicago though is the more American city. It wants to be more. A Paris in the Midwest, and it tries, and, in a charming way, at least to me, it always fails. Chicago is at its best when it embraces its Chicago-ness. It's tough. Gritty. But there is that lake. And a small town moment around any given urban corner.

New York gets the attention, and it deserves it. But Chicago is a jewel and a star in its own right. I love it here.

(Many thanks to the reader who sent that along. Send the story of your life in cities to conor.friedersdorf@gmail.com)

About the Author

Conor Friedersdorf is a California-based staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

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Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

A controversial video of Catholic students clashing with American Indians appeared to tell a simple truth. A second video called that story into question. But neither shows what truly happened.

In a short, viral videoshared widely since Friday, Catholic high school students visiting Washington from Kentucky for the March for Life appeared to confront, and mock, Native Americans who had participated in the Indigenous Peoples March taking place the same day.

By Saturday, the video had been condensed into a single image: One of the students, wearing a Make American Great Again hat, smiles before an Omaha tribal elder, a confrontation viewers took as an act of aggression by a group of white youth against an indigenous community—and by extension, people of color more broadly. Online, reaction was swift and certain, with legislators, news outlets, and ordinary people denouncing the students and their actions as brazenly racist.

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During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

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Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

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There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

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[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

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Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

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